Notes from BbWorld21 (online)

One of the benefits we have since pandemic last year is many conferences/events that were used to be fewer chances for us to attend due to budget have become free for attending online. #BbWorld21 is one of them. I want to express my gratefulness and appreciation for these organisers. They have made a lot of effort on supporting wide communities, and provided opportunities for us to carry on knowing the latest research, new development, use cases, challenges, solutions, trend, and take time to rethink our own practice. Indeed great thanks to the presenters too.

BbWorld 2021 was taken on 13-15 and 20-22 July. Because of different time-zones, most sessions were at afternoons and in evenings in BST. I realised that I have already accumulated a list of need-to-watch-later recordings from different resources, so I attended a few sessions that I thought would be the most useful for and relevant to my work in hand, and gave up most sessions that were of my interest. This is one of tips I learned and made changes of – to use my time more efficient and live a mindset of not feeling that I have missed important information. As I know that selected sessions and content will be available in the event platform in the next 30 days, and later will be available in the Blackboard Community site.

My first focus was the Roadmap sessions as they provided the latest updates from the supplier. It’s vital for us to learn if any expected functionalities will be delivered and we can feed them into our own action plan. I like the plan of development was presented by time ranges: current available, 1-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6 months above. However, I have to check back roadmap recordings later if I want to find some specific development information. I was thinking if Blackboard could provide an online active Roadmap version (something like this), it might be even better for all customers to have an overview and find a plan of a specific functionality when they want to. I’m sure internally Blackboard has such methods of developing products.

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I attended three sessions in this topic of Accessibility and Ally, from Michael Shaw (University of Lincoln), Fiona MacNeill (University of Brighton) and a group of Accessibility Champions (Adam Elce, Claire Gardener, Kristen McCartney-Bulmer and Ben Watson) who shared their views/experiences.

The University of Lincoln developed an Accessibility Toolkit, which is for supporting digital content accessibilities. I have seen some universities have provided such support resources. I think in my institution, I developed a guide as a tech guide to Ally which is for VLE content, rather than for wider digital content. Our web team developed some guide to accessibility for web content. What my institution needs to improve is to combine materials created by different support teams together, redesign and make them as an institutional accessibility support source.

Seems many universities have provide Accessibility mandatory training as a staff CPD course. This is a good way to make staff be aware of why and how to improve accessibility quickly. I think there are some well-developed Accessibility training courses that universities can adopt or introduce to their staff if they haven’t had developed their own Accessibility training courses.

• Digital Accessibility: Enabling Participation in the Information Society (University of Southampton)
• Designing Usable and Accessible Technologies (University of Southampton)
• Courses provided by Blackboard Academy
• Inclusive Teaching and Learning Strategies (LexDis 2.0 by researchers in the ECS Accessibility Team (University of Southampton)
• Mobile Accessibility (LexDis 2.0 by researchers in the ECS Accessibility Team (University of Southampton)

UX design is not new, however it seems that people have talked about it increasingly since last year. I first learned it from one of my courses – Interaction Design in 2003, which made me realised cognitive and social issues. In the Ally European User Group meeting of March 2021, Fiona MacNeill presented her experience of supporting Blackboard Ally adoption in the University of Brighton. She shared more in the #BbWorld21 too. I have learned from her presentations:

• An Information Architecture-led Approach she adopted from the book <<How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built>> (Stewart Brand, 1995) to design a service for Ally. If the book is unavailable immediately, probably watching the Stewart Brand’s BBC TV series will help to get an idea.
• A stakeholder analysis method – Customer value chain (a.k.a. ecosystem map) from the book <<Mapping Experiences: A Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams>> (James Kalbach, 2016)
• Project planning template and interactive whiteboard tool – Mural template.
• Engaging activities – using escape rooms to bring learners into the accessibility learning journey.

If you are interested in UX design and interaction design, the UDL Guidelines and IDEO may be helpful as a start.

Other popular topics include Application integration, Data Analytics and Blackboard Ultra courses.

I haven’t used the Developer Documentation site yet, it is definitely very useful for people who support integration between systems and understand how to use Blackboard data and reports. Blackboard provides regular training webinars, and supporting courses via the Blackboard Academy for people to learn the Ultra course. They are good resources if your institution does not provide training. I do recommend people register Blackboard Community and the #BbWorld21 to check any topics that are of interest to you.